EnsEMBL

EnsEMBL (or Ensembl now I think), is the EBI-Sanger Centre Welcome Trust funded project for vertebrate genome annotation and comparative analyses. This extremely ambitious project has succeeded in dramatic form, providing a freely available annotation of the human genome while also making the software and data open source. The project continues to grow and improve as intraspecific polymorphism data is generated highlighting variation with a species and genome sequences of additional species providing key insight into the conservation and evolution of genomes. The Ensembl group provides a critical service of high quality annotation of these genome sequences in a both human browseable and programmatic form to allow biologist and bioinformatician alike to access the data.

Misc Trivia

BioPerl leader Ewan Birney helped conceive and lead Ensembl since its inception. Many other BioPerl contributors and users are based in this project.